With the permit for land located just a matter of feet from the headquarters of the Environmental Protection Agency, Occupy Occupy D.C. activists today used the high ground of Freedom Plaza to reiterate a National Center appeal for congressional oversight hearings regarding grants made by the EPA.

Need for such hearings stem from EPA grants made to the Pacific Institute, which is currently embroiled in an ethics scandal. Concern about the process of giving taxpayer money to groups with both a scientific and advocacy agenda was heightened by the EPA’s apparent scrubbing of its public grantmaking database on or around February 23.

Pacific Institute president Peter Gleick admitted to a “serious lapse of my own professional judgment and ethics” when he confessed to misappropriating the identity of another individual in order to obtain confidential documents from the Heartland Institute — which holds an opposite view on the causes and significance of global warming.

As National Center chairman Amy Ridenour said: “The EPA’s decision to remove information about grants made to the Pacific Institute from the public database, first revealed by the website JunkScience.com, immediately after the National Center for Public Policy Research filed a Freedom of Information Act request for information about those grants, is suspicious.”